It’s estimated that for any publically traded company, it’s appropriate to spend approximately 10% of the company’s annual budget on marketing. Depending on the size of the business, the amount that this equals out to be can differ dramatically. As you can imagine, a million dollar company will only spend $100,000 dollars on marketing, whereas a company that is worth $1 billion will spend $100 million dollars. 
Marketing is important for many reasons, the biggest being it’s the way that people know that your product even exists. There are many ways to spend money allocated for marketing, some are much wiser than others. It’s easy to flush marketing money down the drain, so it’s important to know which basket to put your eggs in, as there is nothing worse than putting every egg in a single basket and having the basket break from underneath leaving your entire budget in a scramble on the pavement.
Want to know how to spend your marketing money in the right place? Consider these tips:
Allocate the Complicated Things to The Pros
You can be a master of one or two things, but as soon as you divide your attention and try to understand everything there is to understand in the world, you’ll be proficient at best at a host of different things. You will waste valuable marketing money if you think you can afford to learn by trial and error. In the case of spending your marketing money in the right place, the first thing you need to do is let the pros handle the complicated things.
This can range from search engine optimization, to mobile app development, to videos, to cloud services. There are many different services involved in marketing, so take all that you can off your plate that doesn’t need to be on your plate with and use somebody who can do a lot of things for the money, and watch your marketing efforts pay off.
Forget About Print
The world is a mobile world and mobile engagement is only growing. If newspapers aren’t already 90% dead, they will be 100% dead before much more time has passed. The only people reading the papers anymore are the older generations. If this isn’t true, it’s just people who just happen to pick one up because a headline intrigued them or they need to kill time in an atmosphere that doesn’t allow phones. If you put your marketing money into expensive print ads, posters, or even billboards, it’s not the right allocation of your money.
The best thing for your company to do is forget about print altogether and look to the future. What does mobile marketing look like in 2020? You need to define that and create the marketing of the future. Put your money into new technology. Create something that excites viewers. That’s the best use for your marketing budget in 2016. Forget the past. Forget print. Go mobile and create the future.